Frank McCourt Quotes
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Why can't this priest go back to Los Angeles and leave me alone? Why is he taking me to lunch when he should be out there visiting the sick and the dying? That's what priests are for.
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I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.
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When I was a teacher, I'd walk into the classroom. I stood at the board. I was the man. I directed operations. I was an intellectual and artistic and moral traffic cop, and I - and I would direct the class, most of the time.
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I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.
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For some reason, I had a responsibility to my family and the people who lived around me. I felt that I had to convey their dignity - the way they dealt with adversity and poverty - and their good humor.
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The day I write my last word will be the day that I feel free.
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My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that's all.
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Scatter my ashes on the Shannon.
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I became a teacher all right. I wanted to become a teacher because I had a misconception about it. I didn't know that I'd be going into - when I first became a high school teacher in New York, that I'd be going into a battle zone, and no one prepared me for that.
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They know it's a forty-minute showdown, you versus them. … They have you by the balls and you created the situation, man. You didn't have to talk to them like that. They don’t care about your mood, your headache, your troubles. They have their own problems, and you are one of them.
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When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams.
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I asked my dad what afflicted meant and he said 'Sickness son, and things that don't fit.'
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Ireland, once you live there, you're seduced by it.
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I'm always a great student of writers' work habits. Balzac sat at his desk dressed in a monk's robe, and he always had to have a rotten apple on his desk. The smell of the apple inspired him somehow.
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I was ashamed of it, of the poverty I came from.
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It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head.
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I can do no more than tell the truth.
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Way back in my mid-20s, I started making notes. I would just jot things down: lists of street names, songs, peculiar turns of speech, jokes, whatever.